Once you start watching TED talks, ordinary life falls away. The corridor from Silicon Alley to Valley seems to crackle, and a new in-crowd emerges: the one that loves Linux, organic produce, behavioral economics, transhistorical theories and

Wanna give a shout out: if you like the TED talks, you should check out fora.tv. Recorded lectures online, downloadable in multiple formats. The problem is there are a lot of duds, but they are slowly getting the rating and social networking components together so that you can stick to good stuff. In general they’re less punchy than TED, but still a lot of good stuff.